Reefer Madness

Marijuana has not been de facto legalized, and the war on drugs is not just
about cocaine and heroin. In fact, today, when we don't have enough jail cells
for murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals, there may be more people
in federal and state prisons for marijuana offenses than at any other time in
U.S. history

by Eric Schlosser

In the state of Indiana a person convicted of armed robbery will serve about
five years in prison; someone convicted of rape will serve about twelve; and a
convicted murderer can expect to spend twenty years behind bars. These figures
are actually higher than the figures nationwide: eight years and eight months
in prison is the average punishment for an American found guilty of murder. The
prison terms given by Indiana judges tend to be long, but with good behavior an
inmate will serve no more than half the nominal sentence. Those facts are worth
keeping in mind when considering the case of Mark Young. At the age of
thirty-eight Young was arrested at his Indianapolis home for brokering the sale
of 700 pounds of marijuana grown on a farm in nearby Morgan County. Young was
tried and convicted under federal law. He had never before been charged with
drug trafficking. He had no history of violent crime. Young's role in the
illegal transaction had been that of a middleman--he never distributed the
drugs; he simply introduced two people hoping to sell a large amount of
marijuana to three people wishing to buy it. The offense occurred a year and a
half prior to his arrest. No confiscated marijuana, money, or physical evidence
of any kind linked Young to the crime. He was convicted solely on the testimony
of co-conspirators who were now cooperating with the government. On February 8,
1992, Mark Young was sentenced by Judge Sarah Evans Barker to life imprisonment
without possibility of parole.

There was so much talk in the 1970s about the decriminalization of marijuana,
and the smoking of marijuana is so casually taken for granted in much of our
culture, that many people assume that a marijuana offense these days will
rarely lead to a prison term. But in fact there may be more people in prison
today for violating marijuana laws than at any other time in the nation's
history. Calculations based on data provided by the Bureau of Prisons and the
United States Sentencing Commission suggest that one of every six inmates in
the federal prison system--roughly 15,000 people--has been incarcerated
primarily for a marijuana offense. The number currently being held in state
prisons and local jails is more difficult to estimate; a conservative guess
would be an additional 20,000 to 30,000. And Mark Young's sentence, though
unusual, is by no means unique. A dozen or more marijuana offenders may now be
serving life sentences in federal penitentiaries without hope of parole; if one
includes middle-aged inmates with sentences of twenty or thirty or forty years,
the number condemned to die in prison may reach into the hundreds. Other
inmates--no one knows how many--are serving life sentences in state
correctional facilities across the country for growing, selling, or even
possessing marijuana.

The phrase "war on drugs" evokes images of Colombian cartels and inner-city
crack addicts. In many ways that is a misperception. Marijuana is and has long
been the most widely used illegal drug in the United States. It is used here
more frequently than all other illegal drugs combined. According to
conservative estimates, one third of the American population over the age of
eleven has smoked marijuana at least once. More than 17 million Americans
smoked it in 1992. At least three million smoke it on a daily basis. Unlike
heroin or cocaine, which must be imported, anywhere from a quarter to half of
the marijuana used in this country is grown here as well. Although popular
stereotypes depict marijuana growers as aging hippies in northern California or
Hawaii, the majority of the marijuana now cultivated in the United States is
being grown in the nation's midsection--a swath running roughly from the
Appalachians west to the Great Plains. Throughout this Marijuana Belt drug
fortunes are being made by farmers who often seem to have stepped from a page
of the old Saturday Evening Post. The value of America's annual marijuana crop
is staggering: plausible estimates start at $4 billion and range up to $24
billion. In 1993 the value of the nation's largest legal cash crop, corn, was
roughly $16 billion.

Marijuana has well-organized supporters who campaign for its legalization and
promote its use through books, magazines, and popular music. They regard
marijuana as not only a benign recreational drug but also a form of herbal
medicine and a product with industrial applications. Marijuana's opponents are
equally passionate and far better organized. They consider marijuana a
dangerous drug--one that harms the user's mental, physical, and spiritual
well-being, promotes irresponsible sexual behavior, and encourages disrespect
for traditional values. At the heart of the ongoing bitter debate is a hardy
weed that can grow wild in all fifty states. The two sides agree that countless
lives have been destroyed by marijuana, but disagree about what should be
blamed: the plant itself, or the laws forbidding its use.

The war on drugs embraced by President Ronald Reagan began largely as a
campaign against marijuana organized by conservative parents' groups in the
late 1970s. After more than a decade in which penalties for marijuana offenses
had been reduced at both the state and federal levels, the laws regarding
marijuana were made much tougher in the 1980s. More resources were devoted to
their enforcement, and punishments more severe than those administered during
the "reefer madness" of the 1930s became routine. All the legal tools commonly
associated with the fight against heroin and cocaine trafficking--civil
forfeitures, enhanced police search powers, the broad application of conspiracy
laws, a growing reliance on the testimony of informers, and mechanistic
sentencing formulas, such as mandatory minimums and "three strikes, you're
out"--have been employed against marijuana offenders. The story of how Mark
Young got a life sentence reveals a great deal about the emergence of the
American heartland as the region where a vast amount of the nation's marijuana
is now grown; about the changing composition of the federal prison population;
and about the effects of the war on drugs, a dozen years after its declaration,
throughout America's criminal-justice system. Underlying Young's tale is a
simple question: How does a society come to punish a person more harshly for
selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun?

The Plant in Question

"MARIJUANA" is the Mexican colloquial name for a plant known to botanists as
Cannabis sativa. In various forms it has long been familiar throughout the
world: in Africa as "dagga," in China as "ma," in Northern Europe as "hemp."
Although cannabis most likely originated in the steppes of central Asia, it now
thrives in almost any climate, spreading like milkweed or thistle, crowding out
neighboring grasses and reaching heights of three to twenty feet at maturity.
Marijuana has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years; it is one of the oldest
agricultural commodities not grown for food. The stalks of the plant contain
fibers that have been woven for millennia to make rope, canvas, and paper.
Cannabis is dioecious, spawning male and female plants in equal proportion. The
flowering buds of the female--and to a lesser extent those of the male--secrete
a sticky yellow resin rich with cannabinoids, the more than sixty compounds
unique to marijuana. Several of them are psychoactive, most prominently
delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

Lester Grinspoon, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical
School, believes that marijuana will someday be hailed as a "miracle drug," one
that is safe, inexpensive, and versatile. In his book Marihuana, the Forbidden
Medicine (1993) Grinspoon provides anecdotal evidence that smoking marijuana
can relieve the nausea associated with chemotherapy, prevent blindness induced
by glaucoma, serve as an appetite stimulant for AIDS patients, act as an
anti-epileptic, ward off asthma attacks and migraine headaches, alleviate
chronic pain, and reduce the muscle spasticity that accompanies multiple
sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and paraplegia. Other doctors think that Grinspoon
is wildly optimistic, and that no "crude drug" like marijuana--composed of more
than 400 chemicals--should be included in the modern pharmacopoeia. They point
out that effective synthetic drugs, of precise dosage and purity, have been
developed for every one of marijuana's potential uses. Dronabinol, a synthetic
form of delta-9-THC, has been available for years, though some clinical
oncologists find it inferior to marijuana as an anti-nausea agent. There have
been remarkably few large-scale studies that might verify or disprove
Grinspoon's claims. Nevertheless, thirty-six states allow the medicinal use of
marijuana, and eight patients are currently receiving it from the Public Health
Service. According to Grinspoon, the federal government has always been far
more interested in establishing marijuana's harmful effects than in discovering
any of its benefits, while major drug companies have little incentive to fund
expensive research on marijuana. As Grinspoon explains, "You cannot patent this
plant."

The long-term health effects of chronic marijuana use, and marijuana's role as
a "gateway" to the use of other illegal drugs, are issues surrounded by great
controversy. Marijuana does not create a physical dependence in its users, but
it does create a psychological dependence in some. People who smoke marijuana
are far more likely to experiment later with other psychoactive drugs, but no
direct cause-and-effect relationship has ever been established. Delta-9-THC is
highly lipid-soluble and has a half-life of five days, which means that it
diffuses widely throughout the human body and remains there for quite some
time: an occasional user can fail a urine test three days after smoking a
single joint, and a heavy user may test positive after abstaining from
marijuana for more than a month. Delta-9-THC's persistence within various cells
and vital organs (also a characteristic of Valium, Thorazine, and quinine)
suggests that it could have the ability to exert subtly harmful effects; few
have yet been proved. Studies of lifelong heavy marijuana users in Jamaica,
Greece, and Costa Rica reveal little psychological or physiological damage.
Much more research, however, needs to be done in the areas of cognition,
reproduction, and immunology. Adolescent users in particular would be at risk
if marijuana were found to have pernicious systemic effects. Some studies have
shown that short-term memory deficiencies in heavy smokers, though reversible,
may endure long after the cessation of marijuana use. Other studies have
demonstrated in vitro and in laboratory animals that marijuana may have a mild
immunosuppressive effect, but no study has conclusively linked delta-9-THC to
immune-system changes in human beings. Well-publicized horror stories from the
1970s--that marijuana kills brain cells, damages chromosomes, and prompts men
to grow breasts--were based on faulty research.

Smoking marijuana does seem to damage the pulmonary system, in some of the ways
that inhaling tobacco smoke does. In a study of people who have smoked four or
five joints a day for more than ten years, the physician Donald P. Tashkin, of
the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center, has found
substantial evidence that marijuana smoke can cause chronic bronchitis, changes
in cells of the central airway which are potentially pre-cancerous, and an
impairment in scavenger-cell function which could lead to a risk of respiratory
infection. A joint seems to deliver four times as much carcinogenic tar as a
tobacco cigarette of the same size. Tashkin expects that some heavy marijuana
users will eventually suffer cancers of the mouth, throat, and lungs, although
none of his research subjects has yet developed a malignancy. Oddly enough, the
more potent strains of marijuana may prove less dangerous, since less of them
needs to be smoked.

There is much less disagreement about the short-term health effects of
marijuana. According to the physician Leo Hollister, a former president of the
American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, who now teaches at the University
of Texas, the occasional use of marijuana by a healthy adult poses no greater
risks than the moderate consumption of alcohol. For a variety of reasons,
however, marijuana should not be smoked by schizophrenics, pregnant women, and
people with heart conditions. Although the misuse of over-the-counter
medications such as aspirin, acetaminophen, and antihistamines each year kills
hundreds of Americans, not a single death has ever been credibly attributed
directly to smoking or consuming marijuana in the 5,000 years of the plant's
recorded use. Marijuana is one of the few therapeutically active substances
known to man for which there is no well-defined fatal dose. It has been
estimated that a person would have to smoke a hundred pounds of marijuana a
minute for fifteen minutes in order to induce a lethal response.

Criminalized, Decriminalized, Recriminalized

THE first American law pertaining to marijuana, passed by the Virginia Assembly
in 1619, required every farmer to grow it. Hemp was deemed not only a valuable
commodity but also a strategic necessity; its fibers were used to make sails
and riggings, and its by-products were transformed into oakum for the caulking
of wooden ships. Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland eventually allowed hemp
to be exchanged as legal tender, in order to stimulate its production and
relieve Colonial money shortages. Although a number of the Founding Fathers,
including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, later grew hemp on their
estates, there is no evidence that they were aware of the plant's psychoactive
properties. The domestic production of hemp flourished, especially in Kentucky,
until after the Civil War, when it was replaced by imports from Russia and by
other domestic materials. In the latter half of the nineteenth century
marijuana became a popular ingredient in patent medicines and was sold openly
at pharmacies in one-ounce herbal packages and in alcohol-based tinctures as a
cure for migraines, rheumatism, and insomnia.

The political upheaval in Mexico that culminated in the Revolution of 1910 led
to a wave of Mexican immigration to states throughout the American Southwest.
The prejudices and fears that greeted these peasant immigrants also extended to
their traditional means of intoxication: smoking marijuana. Police officers in
Texas claimed that marijuana incited violent crimes, aroused a "lust for
blood," and gave its users "superhuman strength." Rumors spread that Mexicans
were distributing this "killer weed" to unsuspecting American schoolchildren.
Sailors and West Indian immigrants brought the practice of smoking marijuana to
port cities along the Gulf of Mexico. In New Orleans newspaper articles
associated the drug with African-Americans, jazz musicians, prostitutes, and
underworld whites. "The Marijuana Menace," as sketched by anti-drug
campaigners, was personified by inferior races and social deviants. In 1914 El
Paso, Texas, enacted perhaps the first U.S. ordinance banning the sale or
possession of marijuana; by 1931 twenty-nine states had outlawed marijuana,
usually with little fanfare or debate. Amid the rise of anti-immigrant
sentiment fueled by the Great Depression, public officials from the Southwest
and from Louisiana petitioned the Treasury Department to outlaw marijuana.
Their efforts were aided by a lurid propaganda campaign. "Murder Weed Found Up
and Down Coast," one headline warned; "Deadly Marijuana Dope Plant Ready For
Harvest That Means Enslavement of California Children." Harry J. Anslinger, the
commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, at first doubted the
seriousness of the problem and the need for federal legislation, but soon he
pursued the goal of a nationwide marijuana prohibition with enormous gusto. In
public appearances and radio broadcasts Anslinger asserted that the use of this
"evil weed" led to killings, sex crimes, and insanity. He wrote sensational
magazine articles with titles like "Marijuana: Assassin of Youth." In 1937
Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, effectively criminalizing the possession
of marijuana throughout the United States. A week after it went into effect, a
fifty-eight-year-old marijuana dealer named Samuel R. Caldwell became the first
person convicted under the new statute. Although marijuana offenders had been
treated leniently under state and local laws, Judge J. Foster Symes, of Denver,
lectured Caldwell on the viciousness of marijuana and sentenced him to four
hard years at Leavenworth Penitentiary.

Harry J. Anslinger is a central figure in the history of American drug policy.
He headed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its inception through five
presidential Administrations spanning more than three decades. Anslinger had
much in common with his rival, J. Edgar Hoover. Both were conservative,
staunchly anti-communist proponents of law and order who imbued nascent federal
bureaus with their own idiosyncracies. Anslinger did not believe in a
public-health approach to drug addiction; he dismissed treatment clinics as
"morphine feeding stations" and "barrooms for addicts." In his view, strict
enforcement of the law was the only proper response to illegal drug use; he
urged judges to "jail offenders, then throw away the key." Anslinger's outlook
was consistent with that of most Americans, though his opinions proved more
resistant to new scientific evidence. When the New York Academy of
Medicine--after years of research--issued a report in 1944 concluding that
marijuana use did not cause violent behavior, provoke insanity, lead to
addiction, or promote opiate use, Anslinger angrily dismissed its authors as
"dangerous" and "strange."

America's drug problem often seemed the work of foreign powers: during the
Second World War, Anslinger accused the Japanese of using narcotics to sap
America's will to fight; a few years later he asserted that Communists were
attempting the same ploy. The Boggs Act, passed by Congress at the height of
the McCarthy era, specified the same penalties for marijuana and heroin
offenses--two to five years in prison for first-time possession. As
justification for the long sentences contained in that act and in the Narcotic
Control Act, which followed in 1956, Anslinger stressed marijuana's crucial
role as a "stepping-stone" to narcotics addiction. Like Hoover, he maintained
dossiers on well-known entertainers whose behavior seemed un-American.
Anslinger disliked jazz and kept a special file, "Marijuana and Musicians,"
filled with reports on band members who played with Cab Calloway, Louis
Armstrong, Les Brown, Count Basie, Jimmy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington, among
others. For months Anslinger planned a nationwide roundup of popular
musicians--a scheme that was foiled by the inability of FBN agents to
infiltrate the jazz milieu. Although Anslinger's opposition to drug use was
both passionate and sincere, he made one notable exception. In his memoir, The
Murderers, Anslinger confessed to having arranged a regular supply of morphine
for "one of the most influential members of Congress," who had become an
addict. Anslinger's biographer believes that addict was Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy.

By 1962, when Harry J. Anslinger retired, many states had passed "little Boggs
Acts" with penalties for marijuana possession or sale tougher than those
demanded by federal law. In Louisiana sentences for simple possession ranged
from five to ninety-nine years; in Missouri a second offense could result in a
life sentence; and in Georgia a second conviction for selling marijuana to
minors could bring the death penalty. As the political climate changed during
the 1960s, so did attitudes toward drug abuse. A series of commissions
appointed by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson repudiated some of
the basic assumptions that had guided marijuana policy for more than fifty
years, denying a direct link between the drug and violent crime or heroin use.
As marijuana use became widespread among white middle-class college students,
there was a reappraisal of marijuana laws that for decades had imprisoned poor
Mexicans and African-Americans without much public dissent. Drug-abuse policy
shifted from a purely criminal-justice approach to one also motivated by
interests of public health, with more emphasis on treatment than on punishment.
In 1970 the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act finally
differentiated marijuana from other narcotics and reduced federal penalties for
possession of small amounts. As directed by Congress, President Richard Nixon
appointed a bipartisan commission to study marijuana. In 1972 the Shafer
Commission issued its report, advocating the decriminalization of marijuana for
personal use--a recommendation that Nixon flatly rejected. Nevertheless, eleven
states, containing a third of the country's population, decriminalized
marijuana in the 1970s, and most other states weakened their laws against it.
President Jimmy Carter endorsed decriminalization, and it seemed that long
prison sentences for marijuana offenders had been consigned to the nation's
past.

But they had not. One of the seminal events in the creation of the modern
American anti-drug movement was a backyard barbecue held in Atlanta, Georgia,
during August of 1976. In the aftermath of their daughter's birthday party, Ron
and Marsha Manatt combed through the wet grass in their pajamas, at one in the
morning, with flashlights, finding dozens of marijuana roaches, rolling-paper
packets, and empty bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 fortified wine discarded by their
twelve- and thirteen-year-old guests. Alarmed by these discoveries, the Manatts
gathered local parents in their living room and formed what was soon known as
the Nosy Parents Association, a group dedicated to preventing teenage drug use.
Marsha Manatt wrote to Robert DuPont, the head of the National Institute on
Drug Abuse; he helped arrange her introduction to Thomas Gleaton, a professor
of health education at Georgia State University. There soon arose the Parents'
Resource Institute for Drug Education and the National Federation of Parents
for Drug-Free Youth, two organizations backed by top officials at NIDA and the
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) which would exert tremendous influence on
the nation's drug policies. Thousands of other parents' groups soon formed
nationwide, and Ross Perot helped launch the Texans' War on Drugs.

Marijuana use seemed epidemic: a survey in 1976 found that one out of twelve
high school seniors smoked pot on a daily basis. In the 1960s the youth
counterculture had celebrated marijuana's reputation as a drug for outcasts and
freaks. One Yippie leader had confidently predicted that the slogan of the
coming revolution would be "pot, freedom, license." The conservative parents'
groups took such words to heart and similarly invested marijuana with great
meaning. Robert DuPont, who at NIDA had once supported decriminalization, later
decried the "tumultuous change in values" among the young--their pursuit of
pleasure, their lack of responsibility to society--and argued that "the leading
edge of this cultural change was marijuana use."

The election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency brought the war on drugs to the
White House. In June of 1982 President Reagan signed an executive order
creating a new post in his Administration--head of the White House Drug Abuse
Policy Office--and appointed a chemist, Carlton Turner, to the job. Turner had
for many years directed the Marijuana Research Project at the University of
Mississippi, running the government's only marijuana farm. Turner believed that
marijuana was an extremely dangerous drug--one that, among other things, might
have the power to induce homosexuality. In 1977 the DEA had acknowledged that
decriminalization was a policy worth considering; three years later it called
marijuana the most urgent drug problem facing the United States. Richard
Bonnie, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School who was an
influential member of the Shafer Commission staff, believes that advocates of
marijuana-law reform were pushed out of the mainstream by the growing stridency
and power of the parents' groups. Political moderates soon abandoned the issue.
Amid their silence, philosophies of "zero tolerance" and "user accountability"
revived the notion that what drug offenders deserved most was punishment. The
Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and
the Anti-Drug Abuse Amendment Act of 1988 raised federal penalties for
marijuana possession, cultivation, and trafficking. Sentences were to be
determined by the quantity of the drug involved; "conspiracies" and "attempts"
were to be punished as severely as completed acts; and possession of a hundred
marijuana plants now carried the same sentence as possession of a hundred grams
of heroin.

The Caprice of Geography

MARIJUANA is currently classified as a Schedule I controlled substance,
implying that it has a high potential for abuse, no officially accepted
medicinal uses, and no safe level of use under medical supervision. Heroin,
LSD, and peyote are other Schedule I drugs; cocaine and phencyclidine (PCP) are
listed in Schedule II, allowing doctors to prescribe them. Under federal law it
is illegal to buy, sell, grow, or possess any amount of marijuana anywhere in
the United States. Penalties for a first offense range from probation to life
imprisonment, with fines of up to $4 million, depending on the quantity of
marijuana involved. Moreover, it is illegal to use the U.S. Postal Service or
other interstate shippers for the advertisement, import, or export of such
marijuana paraphernalia as roach clips, water pipes, and, in some instances,
cigarette papers--a crime that can lead to imprisonment and fines of up to
$100,000. Under civil-forfeiture statutes real estate, vehicles, cash,
securities, jewelry, and any other property connected with a marijuana offense
are subject to immediate seizure. The federal government need not prove that
the property was bought with the proceeds of illegal drug sales, only that it
was involved in the commission of a crime--that marijuana was grown on certain
land or transported in a particular vehicle. Property may be forfeited even
after a defendant has been found innocent of the offense, since the burden of
proof that applies to people--"beyond a reasonable doubt"--does not apply in
accusations against inanimate objects. Property can be forfeited without its
owner's ever being charged with a crime. On top of fines, incarceration, and
forfeiture, a convicted marijuana offender may face the revocation or denial of
more than 460 federal benefits, including student loans, small-business loans,
professional licenses, and farm subsidies. In international smuggling cases the
offender's passport can be revoked.

State marijuana laws were also toughened during the 1980s and now vary
enormously. Some states classify marijuana with drugs like mescaline and
heroin, while others give it a separate legal category. In New York state
possessing slightly less than an ounce of marijuana brings a $100 fine, rarely
collected. In Nevada possessing any amount of marijuana is a felony. In Montana
selling a pound of marijuana, first offense, could lead to a life sentence,
whereas in New Mexico selling 10,000 pounds of marijuana, first offense, could
be punished with a prison term of no more than three years. In some states it
is against the law to be in a room where marijuana is being smoked, even if you
don't smoke any. In some states you may be subject to criminal charges if
someone else uses, distributes, or cultivates marijuana on your property. In
Idaho selling water pipes could lead to a prison sentence of nine years. In
Kentucky products made of hemp fibers, such as paper and clothing, not only are
illegal but carry the same penalties associated with an equivalent weight of
marijuana. In Arizona, where marijuana use is forbidden, the crime can be
established by the failure of a urine test: a person could theoretically be
prosecuted in Phoenix for a joint smoked in Philadelphia more than a week
before.

Crossing an invisible state line with marijuana in your car can result in
vastly different punishments. If you are caught with three ounces of marijuana
in Union City, Ohio, you will probably be fined $100. But if you are caught in
the town of the same name literally across the road in Indiana, you could face
nine months to two years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000, a felony record,
suspension of your driver's license, forfeiture of your car, and charges of
marijuana possession, of possession with intent to distribute, and of
"maintaining a common nuisance" (for the criminal use of an automobile). That
one arrest in Indiana might cost you the $10,000 fine and at least $5,000 in
legal fees, plus the value of your forfeited car. Wide discrepancies in
punishment occur not just between states but also from county to county within
a given state. In La Salle County, Illinois, a first-time offender arrested
with 300 pounds of marijuana might be sentenced to four months in boot camp.
Sixty-five miles to the south, in McLean County, the same person convicted of
the same crime would more likely receive a prison sentence of four to eight
years.

In 1992 more than 340,000 people were arrested nationwide for violating
marijuana laws. Almost three quarters of those arrests were for simple
possession, a crime that generally does not lead to incarceration. But
possession of more than an ounce--roughly equal to the amount of tobacco in a
pack of cigarettes--is in many states a felony. Conviction may lead to a few
months or a few years behind bars and the loss of a house or a job. People who
use marijuana as medicine must either buy it from drug dealers or grow it
themselves, often in violation of the law. James Cox, a cancer patient in St.
Louis, was found guilty of growing marijuana and sentenced to fifteen years in
prison; after the verdict both he and his wife attempted suicide. Orland
Foster, an AIDS patient in North Carolina, served fifteen months for growing
marijuana; one of his cellmates served less time for killing a woman. Now on
probation, Foster must either give up marijuana and risk losing weight, or
violate the terms of his release and risk going back to prison.

In perhaps the most extraordinary case of this kind, Jim Montgomery, a
paraplegic immobilized from the waist down, who smoked marijuana to relieve
muscle spasms, was arrested in Sayre, Oklahoma, when sheriffs found two ounces
of pot in the pouch on the back of his wheelchair. Montgomery was tried and
convicted in 1992, by a jury, for possession of marijuana with intent to
distribute, for possession of paraphernalia, for unlawful possession of a
weapon during the commission of a crime (two handguns inherited from his
father, a police officer), and for maintaining a place resorted to by users of
controlled substances. His sentence was life in prison, plus sixteen years.
Both the judge and the local prosecutor were disturbed by the sentence chosen
by the jury; the judge subsequently reduced it to ten years. Montgomery spent
ten months in a prison medical unit, where he developed a life-threatening
infection, before being released on bond. His appeal is now pending. "I'll
never go back to that prison," he says. "I'd rather put a bullet in my head."
His case has already cost him more than $30,000 in legal fees. The government's
effort to seize Montgomery's home, shared with his widowed mother, proved
unsuccessful.

Oklahoma today has a well-deserved reputation for being the worst place in the
United States to be caught with marijuana. On June 11, 1992, Larry Jackson, a
small-time crook with a lengthy record of nonviolent offenses, was arrested at
a friend's Tulsa apartment. On the floor near Jackson's right foot a police
officer noticed a minuscule amount of marijuana--0.16 of a gram, which is
0.005644 of an ounce. Jackson was charged with felony possession of marijuana,
convicted, and given a life sentence. In Oklahoma City, Leland James Dodd was
given two life sentences, plus ten years, for buying fifty pounds of marijuana
from undercover officers in a "reverse sting." Oklahoma is not alone in handing
out life sentences for buying marijuana from the government. In Tuscaloosa
County, Alabama, William Stephen Bonner, a truck driver, was sent away for life
without possibility of parole after state narcotics agents delivered forty
pounds of marijuana to his bedroom. Raymond Pope, a resident of Georgia, was
lured to Baldwin County, Alabama, in 1990 with promises of cheap marijuana; he
bought twenty-seven pounds from local sheriffs in a reverse sting, was
convicted, and was sentenced to life without possibility of parole. Pope's
criminal record consisted of prior convictions for stealing televisions and
bedspreads from Georgia motels. He is now imprisoned 400 miles from his family.
He has three young children.

Although the penalties for buying, selling, or possessing marijuana are often
severe, the penalties for growing it can be even more severe. In Iowa
cultivating any amount can lead to a five-year prison sentence, in Colorado to
an eight-year sentence, in Missouri to a fifteen-year sentence. In the state of
Virginia the recommended punishment for growing a single marijuana plant is a
prison term of five to thirty years.

A Farm in Morgan County

IN November of 1988 Claude Atkinson and Ernest Montgomery met at a Denny's near
the airport in Indianapolis to discuss setting up a large-scale
marijuana-growing operation. Atkinson, a fifty-nine-year-old Indiana native,
was by all accounts charismatic and highly skilled at cultivating marijuana.
Ostensibly a used-farm-implements dealer, Atkinson had organized huge marijuana
farms in Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky. His knowledge of growing techniques
was much more impressive than his skill at eluding capture. In 1984
law-enforcement authorities had linked him to a pot farm in Paragon, Indiana;
the following year he was caught growing marijuana with artificial light in an
immense Indianapolis warehouse; and in 1987 a deer hunter stumbled upon
thousands of his marijuana plants in an Indiana field. Claude Atkinson had cut
a series of deals with the government, informing on others after each arrest
and serving brief terms in prison, where he recruited employees for future
ventures. Now fresh out of custody and broke, he was ready to get back into the
growing business. Ernest Montgomery was an unemployed truck driver in his early
forties who wanted to make big money. They agreed to form a partnership, with
Montgomery supplying the capital and Atkinson the expertise. Soon after their
meeting Claude Atkinson went to the Indiana statehouse and formed a dummy
corporation, R.P.Z. Investments, using one of his many pseudonyms, Arno Zepp.

That fall Atkinson supervised the construction of a large "grow room" in the
basement of a secluded cabin that Montgomery owned in Gosport. Montgomery
enlisted his younger brother, Jerry, a gravedigger with a slight drinking
problem, to help with the task. Together the three men drilled holes in the
concrete floor for drainage, built a cooling system, assembled ballasts and
reflectors, suspended grow lights with thousand-watt halide bulbs from the
ceiling, and planted marijuana seeds in small pots. They installed a generator
so that the operation would not be detected through an incongruously high
electric bill. Montgomery invited David Lee Haynes, a young lumberyard ripsaw
operator from Louisville, Kentucky, and the son of an old friend, to come live
at the cabin and tend the plants. After digging graves all day, Jerry
Montgomery would visit the dark basement in the evenings. By spring the group
had approximately 12,500 seedlings of marijuana, contained in sixteen plywood
flats. What they needed next was a farm.

In May of 1989 Martha Brummett, an elderly woman hard of hearing, agreed to
lease her farmhouse halfway between Eminence and Cloverdale, in Morgan County,
to R.P.Z. Investments. It came with about forty acres, a barn, and an option to
buy. Martha Brummett was surprised that when a "Charlie Peters" arrived to sign
the lease, the woman with him remained in the car and never entered the house.
Nevertheless, Brummett innocently signed over her farm for $10,000 in cash,
which she then took straight to her bank.

After Ernest Montgomery and his wife, Cindy, obtained the house, David Haynes
moved into it, to babysit the operation, having obtained a sham rental
agreement from R.P.Z. Investments as a legal buffer against what was about to
happen on the land. The group plowed and tilled the field, fertilized it, and
planted corn. Once the corn had reached a good height, they planted marijuana,
hiding it amid the stalks. Over the summer they walked the fields, "sexing" the
marijuana--eliminating all the males. The females, left unpollinated, would
produce a much higher level of delta-9-THC in their buds, and would thus become
a much more valuable crop: sensimilla. In late September, before the corn
leaves turned golden, the group harvested the marijuana and then cured it in
the barn for two weeks and cut it into "books" about a foot wide and three feet
long. The books were hauled into the farmhouse or driven to the cabin in
Gosport for manicuring: the stems, orphan leaves, and fan leaves were separated
from the precious buds. So far the operation had gone smoothly. Soon there
would be about 900 pounds of high-quality marijuana to sell. Now the group
needed buyers. Ernest Montgomery thought that Mark Young, a man whom he had met
a few times with Cindy, might know the right people to call.

Mark Young was thirty-six and had been smoking marijuana on a daily basis since
his late teens. He grew up in Christian Park Heights, a middle-class
neighborhood on the east side of Indianapolis. His father left the family when
Mark was two; he and his sister, Andrea, were raised by their mother, Mary, who
worked as a waitress or a hostess to pay the bills. Young was a willful,
stubborn, charming boy, always getting into trouble. He seemed to have,
throughout his pranks and petty thefts, the sort of bad luck that is almost
uncanny--often he would get caught while his friends got away. Young dropped
out of high school after a year, became a father at the age of sixteen, married
to give the child his name, divorced, worked as a carpet-layer, washed dishes,
laid concrete, tended bar, sold used cars, and rebuilt Harley-Davidson
motorcycles. He kept an album filled with pictures of his favorite Harleys. He
knew all the local biker gangs, but remained apart; Young seemed to get into
enough trouble on his own. He dated many attractive women, lived a fast life,
and slowly acquired a criminal record--nothing violent, just misdemeanors for
driving without a license, for possession of marijuana, for taking a
girlfriend's stereo. He also earned two felony convictions: one at the age of
twenty-one, for attempting to pass a fraudulent prescription, and the other at
the age of twenty-five, for possession of a few amphetamines and Quaaludes.
Each felony brought a suspended sentence, probation, and a one-dollar fine.
When Ernest Montgomery called, Mark Young was rebuilding motorcycles, selling
used cars wholesale, and looking for new income. He had held a financial
interest in a number of massage parlors, which were now closed. His dream was
to get some money, move to Florida, build custom Harleys, and work part-time as
a fishing guide on Lake Okeechobee.

Claude Atkinson, Ernest Montgomery, and Mark Young met in the family room of
Young's house in early October. The price of the marijuana was set at $1,200 a
pound. If Young found buyers, he would receive a commission of $100 for every
pound sold. Not long after, Atkinson and Montgomery returned to Young's house,
where they were introduced to two men from Florida who were acting on behalf of
someone seeking to buy all the marijuana the group could supply. Atkinson
offered a hundred pounds a week; the marijuana was still being manicured and
could not be delivered all at once. Within days a man from New York arrived at
Young's house with $120,000 in a cardboard box. While the New York buyer
inspected the marijuana at Montgomery's Indianapolis house, Atkinson remained
behind, counting the money. The deal was completed, and Young was handed
$10,000 in cash. The New York buyer eventually paid for 600 more pounds, in
transactions that took place at Montgomery's house. By Christmas all the
high-quality marijuana was gone, the last 200 pounds either distributed to
workers who had helped with various tasks or sold to an acquaintance of
Montgomery's in Illinois.

The town of Eminence, Indiana, is about twenty-five miles west of Indianapolis.
Near its only intersection is a Citizens Bank, a small church, a convenience
store, and a post office built of concrete blocks and painted royal blue. The
town boasts 180 inhabitants and looks as though it has not seen much new
construction since the interval between the world wars. There are countless
small towns like Eminence across the Midwest, slightly faded but still
eulogized as the heartland of this country. To reach the farm used by R.P.Z.
Investments, one must leave Eminence on a narrow country road and then turn
onto a dirt road and drive for a long stretch, past fields of fifty to a
hundred acres where corn, hay, soybeans, and wheat are grown, past modest farms
with collapsing outbuildings, an occasional trailer home, and rusted cars on
cinder blocks. Farther west the land is flat, the acreage of each plot
enormous, but here the countryside feels long settled, with hedges and trees
marking boundary lines. After cleaning out the barn, Atkinson and Montgomery
allowed the lease on Martha Brummett's property to expire. The one-story
farmhouse has been painted beige by its latest occupants; the barn remains
bright red. There is a porch on the front of the house, an enclosed patio on
one side, and a swing set on the lawn. Looking at this humble farm, one would
hardly believe that more than a million dollars' worth of marijuana had been
grown there in the space of about three months.

Inside The Industry

STEVE White looks like an ordinary Indiana farmer, with slightly unkempt hair,
a graying beard, teeth stained by nicotine, and strong hands. The day we met,
he wore an old flannel shirt, gray pants, and battered work boots. His voice
has a low rural twang. He seems to belong in an old pickup, riding through a
vast dusty field. White is the Indiana coordinator for the Drug Enforcement
Administration's Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program. Of his twenty-six
years in federal law enforcement, twenty-one have been spent in Indiana,
working undercover. He knows the state backwards and forwards--has walked it,
driven it, and flown low over it every summer, scrutinizing hills and farmland.
Nobody ever thinks he is a cop. He gets along well with rural people. He grew
up in New York City and attended P.S. 20; his father worked on Wall Street. He
travels to London each year to indulge a passion for collecting English antique
toy soldiers. Special Agent White would be an implausible character in any work
of fiction. Savvy, articulate, self-deprecating, and blunt, he defies easy
categorization and probably knows more about growing marijuana than most of the
people he arrests.

Claude Atkinson was an extremely talented grower with a "good product," White
says--and "a super salesman." The operation near Eminence was of average size
for its time. It is difficult, even from the air, to find marijuana hidden in
corn: "Remember North by Northwest?" White says. "Cary Grant in the cornfield?
We don't have cornfields like that anymore, with wide rows. They broadcast the
stuff, and it's just thicker than hell." Sometimes patches of marijuana will be
distributed here and there amid hundreds of acres. Discovering one may not lead
to the others. Growers tend to be much more concerned about hiding their
marijuana from thieves than from the government. A rural underworld has emerged
around marijuana, secretive and unknown to outsiders; booby traps are laid in
cornfields. There is now a group of people in the Marijuana Belt, known as
"patch pirates," who earn a living solely by stealing marijuana from growers,
whom they follow. White acknowledges that the booby traps are usually aimed at
patch pirates, not his own men; nevertheless, fishhooks strung at eye level on
fishing line are nondiscriminatory. Outdoor marijuana farms have become smaller
in the past few years, though last summer White's agents found "60,000
beautiful plants" on a farm in Tippecanoe County. The case proved a
disappointment: the DEA never found the grower. "What I want is bodies," White
explains. "I don't give a damn about the dope--that's just something we're
going to burn up." His job involves a daily cat-and-mouse pursuit of marijuana
growers, with both sides changing tactics, adopting new technologies, and
often, after an arrest, amicably discussing tricks of the trade. White harbors
no animosity toward his prey. "These are not heroin or cocaine dealers," he
says. "They're not violent. I find a lot of them personally engaging." What
they are doing is against the law, however, and White loves tracking them down.
He has had a good deal of success lately. In 1992 Indiana led the nation in
federal arrests for marijuana. Last year it ranked third.

Take a map of the United States and draw a circle, including within its
circumference Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, with portions of Ohio to the
east, Kentucky and Tennessee to the south, and Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska to
the west. The region within that circle, Steve White believes, is producing the
majority of the marijuana grown in the United States. The highest-quality
marijuana is cultivated indoors on the West Coast, but for sheer volume, no
other area surpasses the U.S. heartland. White does not find this surprising.
During the Second World War the U.S. government encouraged farmers throughout
the Corn Belt to plant almost 300,000 acres of marijuana, in the hopes of
replacing fiber supplies from Asia which had been cut off by the Japanese. The
program, whose slogan was "Hemp for Victory," turned out to be a financial
disaster and left marijuana growing wild throughout the region. Known as
ditchweed, this marijuana now blankets tens of thousands of acres. For years it
had a negligible delta-9-THC content, and was used mainly as filler by drug
dealers, but there is evidence that the ditchweed may be cross-pollinating with
the potent marijuana now cultivated outdoors. The same growing conditions and
soil that are ideal for corn are also ideal for marijuana. Most local sheriff's
departments employ only three to five officers, with more important things to
do than hunt for marijuana. And over the past fifteen years there have been a
lot of people with strong agricultural skills who have badly needed money--or
have wanted more of it than almost any other job in the region could provide. A
bushel of corn sells for roughly $2.50, a bushel of manicured marijuana for
about $70,000. White thinks that marijuana is the largest cash crop in the
United States, and if not the largest in Indiana, then right up there with corn
and soybeans. Though he is proud of what his office has accomplished, White has
no illusions: "There's more than we think."

During the 1960s and early 1970s nearly all the marijuana smoked in the United
States was imported, mainly from Mexico, Colombia, and Jamaica. Domestic
production rose in reaction to a number of events. The spraying of an
herbicide, paraquat, over Mexican marijuana fields, begun in 1975, created
uneasiness about that nation's product. Successful interdiction efforts by the
U.S. Border Patrol and the Coast Guard made smuggling marijuana more difficult.
And the tougher legal sanctions against trafficking led some foreign drug
dealers to switch from marijuana, a bulk agricultural good with a strong smell,
to cocaine, which is easier to conceal and brings a far higher return per
pound. As marijuana prices rose, American growers responded to consumer demand.
Mark A.R. Kleiman, an associate professor at Harvard University's Kennedy
School of Government, finds this to be a rare instance in which protectionism
actually worked. The anti-drug movement and the burgeoning American marijuana
crop led the DEA to devote more of its resources to marijuana investigations.
Kleiman estimates that by 1988 federal anti-marijuana efforts totaled
approximately $970 million--about 20 to 25 percent of all federal
drug-enforcement expenditures. By 1992 federal convictions for marijuana
outnumbered those for heroin, crack cocaine, and LSD combined. The DEA's
Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program began in 1979 in two states,
California and Hawaii; it now looks for marijuana-farming operations--called
"grows" or "gardens" by members of the trade--in all fifty states.

No one knows exactly how much marijuana is cultivated in the United States. The
numbers published by the government--or anyone else--are largely speculative.
In 1992 the DEA eradicated 3,405 metric tons of cultivated marijuana in the
United States, an amount the DEA says represents more than half the total
domestic output. Critics believe that the DEA actually finds only 10 to 20
percent of the marijuana being grown in this country. With prices ranging from
$500 a pound, for low-quality New Mexican marijuana, to more than $5,000 a
pound for "boutique" strains like Northern Lights and Afghan Kush, it can be
confidently stated that the black market for American marijuana, whatever the
actual tonnage, is immense.

Growers are increasingly moving their crops indoors, using artificial light and
hydroponics, to avoid theft, reduce the risk of detection, control the growing
process, and profit from up to six harvests a year. Thirty mature plants can
easily be grown in an area the size of a bathtub. I asked Steve White to list
some of the places where he has discovered indoor grow operations. He laughed.
"It would be tough for me to say places we haven't found them." Often a false
wall hides a grow room in a house, or a house's foundation doesn't match its
basement, which seems oddly smaller, or there are second stories with no
stairwells, or crawl spaces are hidden beneath floors. Once White rummaged
through a child's closet and found the entrance to a grow area behind the toys.
Without need of a search warrant, the DEA employs thermal-imaging devices,
mounted on helicopters and low-flying airplanes, to detect abnormal heat
sources that may indicate the presence of an indoor growing operation--or a
pottery kiln, or a Jacuzzi. What is found depends upon the skill of the
technician. White has learned that one of the best ways to find an indoor grow
area is with his nose: no matter how well-vented the operation, and despite
electronic devices that can neutralize odors in the air, marijuana will exude a
powerful scent. A few years ago indoor grows were often huge. A group of
janitors in Anderson, Indiana, who had traveled to Israel to study hydroponics,
were caught with 8,100 plants in a building with walls constructed a foot thick
to thwart infrared detection. Nowadays growers rent storage units and
apartments, using phony names and paying in cash, and build small grow
operations at different locations, with timing devices and automatic controls.
The authorities may find one or two--a loss anticipated in the grower's
business plan--without being able to trace ownership.

White has smoked marijuana once, while working undercover, and did not enjoy
the experience. He chain-smokes cigarettes, regrets it, and sees no need to add
marijuana to the nation's list of legal drugs. "We've got tobacco, we've got
alcohol," he said. "Jesus Christ, do we need another hallucinogenic,
carcinogenic substance on the market?" What disturbs him most about marijuana
is the phenomenal sums of money it funnels into an underground economy, and the
great resulting potential for corruption among public officials. I asked
whether a sense of futility ever creeps into his work, given the extent of
cultivation in his state. "I'm not such a fool as to sit here and tell you that
we're going to wipe out marijuana," he replied. But there is no doubt in his
mind that the DEA exerts a deterrent effect. "Every time we have a helicopter
go up on a mission," White said, "there's someone down below who sees it and
thinks, 'Maybe I better not.'"

Ralph Weisheit, a professor of criminal justice at Illinois State University,
does not know Steve White but has come to many of the same conclusions about
marijuana cultivation in the Midwest. Weisheit first became interested in the
subject eight years ago, when he saw, on the television news, an old Illinois
farmer being arrested for cultivating marijuana. The farmer and his son never
smoked marijuana; they grew it to save their farm from foreclosure. Weisheit
was intrigued. With a grant from the research arm of the U.S. Justice
Department, he conducted a two-year study of marijuana cultivation,
interviewing law-enforcement officials in five states and dozens of Illinois
growers who had been caught and convicted. The book based on that study,
Domestic Marijuana: A Neglected Industry (1992), chronicles the rise of
marijuana production in the United States and offers a fascinating portrait of
the growers. Weisheit agrees that the majority of marijuana grown in America
probably originates in the nine-state region described by Steve White. He also
thinks that marijuana is the nation's largest cash crop, by a very wide
margin.

Estimates of how many Americans grow marijuana range from one to three million,
of which anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 are commercial growers. Weisheit
found that aside from being predominantly white and male, marijuana growers
generally do not fit any common stereotypes. Some are pragmatists, growing the
drug purely for the money; during the farm crisis of the 1980s many farmers in
the Marijuana Belt started cultivating marijuana out of desperation. They found
it not only easy money but also easy work. As one farmer told Weisheit, "You
know, I spent most of my life trying to kill weeds, so trying to keep one alive
was hardly a challenge." Other growers are hustlers by nature, classic American
entrepreneurs; they might as well be selling time-shares in a vacation
condominium. They try to build marijuana empires. The risks of the trade only
add to its appeal. Other growers are less competitive, giving away marijuana to
friends or selling it at slightly above cost, sharing agricultural techniques,
comparing their crops the way neighbors might compare homegrown tomatoes.
Marijuana growers are educated and uneducated, liberal and conservative. They
are extremely secretive, worrying more about thieves than about the police. Few
belong to NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws)
and few read High Times magazine or add their names to any list that might
arouse suspicion. Indoor growing often attracts people who love gizmos. There
are endless contraptions that can be added to a grow room, from
computer-controlled watering systems to electric tables that distribute
nutrients evenly by tilting back and forth. Some growers become connoisseurs,
producing high-quality marijuana in small quantities, manipulating not only the
level of delta-9-THC through cross-breeding but also the proportions of all the
other cannabinoids to subtly--or not so subtly--affect the nature of the high.
Weisheit met growers and law-enforcement officers alike who were
extraordinarily passionate about marijuana, eager to discuss its arcane details
for hours. He was surprised, after the publication of his book, by how little
controversy it generated in either camp. His mother was disturbed, however, by
one of its central implications: "She's very anti-drug," Weisheit says, "and
her comment was, 'The thing I don't like about this book is that it makes these
people seem so normal.'"

Late one night I met a commercial marijuana grower who introduced himself as
"Dave." He has been growing marijuana on and off for more than a decade,
beginning outdoors and graduating to a series of increasingly complex indoor
grow systems. Understandably paranoid and suspicious, Dave is also quite proud
of his work and regrets being unable to discuss it with friends. His grow
operation had to be built surreptitiously, over a period of weeks, like a
factory assembled by hand. It utilizes about $50,000 worth of high-tech
hydroponic equipment. When the construction was complete, the whole thing
looked so beautiful that Dave wanted to throw an opening-night party, but he
decided that would not be a good idea. Though he always hated gardening and
never passed a science class in his life, he now has a grasp of marijuana
botany, plant biology, and advanced greenhouse-management techniques which only
Special Agent White could fully appreciate. As he smoked some of his most
recent harvest, Dave shared with me some of the pleasures, risks, rewards, and
bizarre phenomena associated with his profession.

Hidden behind a fake wall, entered through a secret door, in a neighborhood
where you would never, ever, expect to find it, Dave's operation is much larger
than most. There are hundreds of marijuana plants in long rows, growing from
cubes of rock wool, a soil-less medium spun from synthetic fibers, connected
through an intricate system of white plastic pipes. Suspended above them are
extremely bright high-pressure sodium lights, which require a surge of power
from special ballasts to start up. On the ceiling is the bluish flame of a
carbon-dioxide generator burning natural gas. The windows have been sealed and
blacked out. The room is quite warm, the air thick and humid, the whole place
filled with a pungent smell reminiscent of fresh hay. Like a greenhouse without
glass, it feels very still and quiet, except for the sound of water rushing
through narrow pipes.

When everything is running smoothly, Dave controls the elements necessary for
his plants: air, light, heat, and water. In a closed chamber there is no wind;
here a ventilation system provides it, circulating air rich in carbon dioxide.
When outdoor temperatures drop too low, Dave uses the CO2 generator on the
ceiling--in effect "fertilizing the air." Pumps and timers automatically water
the plants, also delivering nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and
potassium, which would normally be derived from soil. One of the critical
factors in growing marijuana is the proportion of darkness to light. Sometimes
Dave's high-pressure sodium lights burn eighteen hours a day, raising the
temperature in the grow room to as high as 110 degrees. During the female
plant's reproductive stage there must be long periods of total, uninterrupted
darkness. As little as two footcandles of light can disrupt the delicate
process by which delta-9-THC accumulates in the buds. Turning on a flashlight
at the wrong moment, Dave says, is enough to ruin his plants.

He is truly a connoisseur, growing an expensive strain of marijuana from the
northern Hindu Kush. As he describes how some outdoor growers stuff marijuana
into plastic garbage bags while it is still wet, he grimaces, like a master
vintner appalled by the improper handling of grapes. The buds are very fragile,
he says: "You're trying to coax this mature flower to retain its essence--and
then store it and seal it at that instant in time." His finished product is
deep green and aromatic, like some rare, exotic spice.

Growing marijuana indoors requires much more work than cultivating it outdoors.
There is also more potential for disaster. A splash of liquid on a hot light
will cause it to explode. A broken pipe can flood the room with hundreds of
gallons of water. A power outage shuts the whole system down. The nutrient
solution, if improperly monitored, can quickly turn too acidic and, as Dave
puts it, "give the plants a heart attack." More common, and yet somehow more
surreal, are insect infestations that can harm valuable young plants. Dave has
battled spider mites, greenhouse whiteflies, and aphids. Insecticides are not
an option in an enclosed room, with a crop that will be smoked. Dave uses
biological controls, unleashing hungry young predators upon unwanted bugs.
Recently he released thousands of miniature wasps. This is insanity, he
thought; but it worked. Inside a nearby refrigerator he always keeps 500
ladybug eggs, next to the soda, in case of an emergency. At the moment Dave is
contending with gnats, who leave his plants alone but swarm and bite him as he
walks about the grow room in the dark.

Someone At The Door

ON March 18, 1990, a pair of deputy sheriffs in Johnson County, Indiana,
spotted a red Jeep being driven erratically and signaled for its driver to pull
off the road. Behind the wheel they found Jerry Montgomery, obviously
intoxicated; littering the truck were three empty vodka bottles, a five-gallon
bucket full of marijuana, and a gray box containing more than $13,000 in cash.
After obtaining a warrant, sheriffs searched Montgomery's house, finding more
marijuana and a locked briefcase hidden under his bed. Deputy John Myers pried
it open with a screwdriver. In the briefcase were receipts for farm equipment;
documents mentioning R.P.Z. Investments, Claude Atkinson, and Ernest
Montgomery; an option to buy a property owned by Martha Brummett; and a number
of books suggesting that this arrest was the beginning, not the end, of a
trail: Indoor Marijuana Horticulture, The Primo Plant, and How to Grow
Marijuana Indoors Under Lights.

The investigation eventually led authorities to a 500-acre farm close to
Solsberry, in Greene County, owned by Arno Zepp, of Investment Holdings, Inc.
On August 22 federal, state, and local law-enforcement agents arrested Claude
Atkinson, raided the farm, and, with the help of volunteers from the Indiana
National Guard, destroyed 10,000 marijuana plants. Atkinson soon began to talk.
In May of 1991 Ernest Montgomery was arrested at his Gosport cabin, where 7,000
marijuana seedlings sat in little pots, ready for planting. Early that same
morning Mark Young was awakened by someone at the front door. Unlike his former
business associates, Young was not growing anything. He and his girlfriend,
Patricia, were in the process of moving to Florida. When he saw a man with a
badge and a gun, Young had no idea what was happening, but assumed that it must
have something to do with unpaid taxes.

More than a dozen law-enforcement officers surrounded the house. Their
commander, a DEA agent, treated Young politely, allowing him to get dressed and
agreeing not to handcuff him in front of the neighbors. At the station Young
read his indictment. He was being charged, under federal law, not only for his
role in distributing 700 pounds of marijuana but also for conspiring to
manufacture all 12,500 marijuana plants grown on Martha Brummett's farm. Young
was unaware of the punishment he might face until later that day. John
Hollywood, a bail bondsman in Indianapolis, arrived in the afternoon to secure
his release. But the government refused to set bail. Under Indiana's strict
state law, the same charges would bring a maximum sentence of twenty-eight
years--at most, fourteen years served in prison, and probably much less. But
under federal law Young's two prior state felony convictions, one of them more
than seventeen years old, classified him as a career drug offender. This arrest
could prove his third strike. At the U.S. attorney's discretion, he faced a
possible mandatory-minimum sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of
parole.

This is the first part of a two-part article. Part Two, next month, will
describe the disposition of the Young case and the perverse consequences
of a legal regime that decrees mandatory-minimum sentences.